EVENING. People.

Private Life Of J.d. Salinger An Open Book These Days

The daughter of reclusive author J.D. Salinger plans to publish a memoir about her childhood and relationship with her father, New York newspapers reported Thursday.

The reports said Simon & Schuster's Pocket Books would publish "The Dream Catcher" by Margaret Salinger, 43, in the fall of 2000 in a six-figure deal.

The reports in The New York Times, the New York Post and the weekly New York Observer said Salinger would write about her father, who is 80 years old and has always fiercely guarded his privacy. Salinger wrote the "The Catcher in the Rye," but the author of the classic teen rebellion novel has not written for publication since 1965.

Just this week, however, letters he wrote to writer Joyce Maynard in the early 1970s were publicly auctioned at Sotheby's in New York. Private collector Peter Norton paid $156,500 for the letters at auction but promptly offered to return them to Salinger.